In many countries you can enjoy free wifi access to the internet nearly everywhere. Also in most industrialized countries you have mobile data contracts with a lot of data volume available - this is a story for another talk but still important in our context. In Germany we have neither of those. The wifi problem is mostly due to a law called "Störerhaftung" which makes it nearly impossible to share your internet connection without expecting to get very expansive legal problems because you can be hold liable for what other people use the connection for. This leads to a great market for the big ISPs and smaller companies, taking a lot of money from the users and the persons who want to provide the internet access only to protect them from a stupid law. This is one of the problems where Freifunk comes into play.
Freifunk is a free and open wireless radio network community, a little bit like open source for networks and internet connections. We try to build our own non-profit network on the basis of wifi connections and internet uplinks that people that share free of charge. The idea behind Freifunk is an open, unlimited, anomymous to use and decentralized network built by the people living in a region. But there is more to it than that. We also try to teach the people how networks work and how to build and expand them on their own. We try to bring the people in contact so a social community raises around Freifunk. And of course, we also want to give the users back some power over the networks they use every day to release them from the bounds of big centralized commercial providers.
Sounds like a great idea? This talk will be about how Freifunk works, from which real world problems it raised, what we already archived and what we try to archive in the future.